In the field of factory automation, the high cost of implementing machine vision technology represents a significant barrier to the wide-spread adoption of industrial image sensors. Traditionally, a large part of this cost has been attributed to the expense of software development. Programmers with specialized machine vision experience are often required to accomplish ostensibly simple machine vision tasks. Although many attempts have been made to simplify application development, there has been no clear solution to the machine vision ease-of-use problem.
The superior ease-of-use characteristics of electronic spreadsheets are well known, especially in such fields as office automation. The use of electronic spreadsheets in the field of machine vision is also known, although in the past, the spreadsheet metaphor could not be adequately exploited for such applications. One reason for this is that machine vision programming tasks typically involve the manipulation of images and other large data sets, a task poorly suited to conventional electronic spreadsheets.
A standard spreadsheet consists of a rectangular grid of cells, each cell representing a single value that is, in turn, a function of some number of other cells in the grid. The standard electronic spreadsheet is suited for implementing formulas that require a relatively small number of input values and generate a single scalar output. In contrast, certain machine vision functions are parameterized by arguments representing a million or more pixel values. Since there is no facility in a standard electronic spreadsheet that enables a single cell to represent multiple values, the standard spreadsheet model is clearly not suited to support functions that operate on images and other large data sets.
In the fields of scientific visualization and computer graphics, the term “spreadsheet” has been loosely applied to certain programs that manage multiple images and other data representations in a two-dimensional rectangular grid within a bounding window. These programs, typically designed for graphical editing and array processing, essentially, allow individual data cells to be formatted as data arrays. However, in order to accommodate data sets of varying size, these interfaces generally abandon the strict two-dimensional grid relationship between cells that is the essence of the spreadsheet paradigm. In fact, most of these programs are unrecognizable as spreadsheets, and are generally unsuited for machine vision.